Friday, April 1. 2011

We are pleased to announce the birth of the Canterbury distribution.
Canterbury is a merge of the efforts of the community distributions formerly
known as Debian, Gentoo, Grml, openSUSE and Arch Linux to produce a really
unified effort and be able to stand up in a combined effort against proprietary
operating systems, to show off that the Free Software community is actually
able to work together for a common goal instead of creating more diversity.

Canterbury will be as technologically simple as Arch, as stable as Debian,
malleable as Gentoo, have a solid Live framework as Grml, and be as open minded
as openSUSE.

Joining the the Canterbury Project Arch Linux developer Pierre Schmitz explained:
"Arch Linux has always been about keeping its technology as simple as possible.
Combining efforts into one single distribution will dramatically reduce complexity
for developers, users and of course upstream projects. Canterbury will be the next
evolutionary step of Linux distributions."

Gerfried Fuchs, who gave a talk about Debian at last year's openSUSE conference,
said "While DEX (Debian Derivatives Exchange) might have been a good idea in principle,
its point of view is too limited. We need to reach out further for true success."

Robin H. Johnson, lead of the Gentoo Infrastructure team, in a panel of core Gentoo
developers at SCALE9x: "I really hate compiling-induced downtime. I've been looking
forward to installing packages with just a couple of keystrokes. By building on the
efforts of other successful distributions, we can take the drudgery out of system
maintenance."

Michael Prokop, founder of the Grml live CD, can be quoted on the effort that
"we managed to create a universal live build framework with grml-live. Our vision was
always that it will be universally usable to further the spreading of Free Software."

Last year's openSUSE conference had the topic of "Collaboration Across Borders".
Klaas Freitag, a respected member of the community, mentioned that "the conference
motto was set intentional and actually this is what I had in mind as a positive outcome
for the conference."

Please be notified that this announce is just the starting point, the necessary
changes will happen in the upcoming days. You can use the #cbproject hashtag
to give us your feedback on
twitter or
identi.ca.